There was also plenty of fun to be had, particularly around the falls. Pictures from the conference are available through <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/155888134@N03">flickr</a>.

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There was also plenty of fun to be had, particularly around the falls. Pictures from the conference are available through [https://www.flickr.com/photos/155888134@N03flickr].

'''Technical Program.''' This was the first ICFHR to utilize a double-blind reviewing process, and we introduced ‘Birds-of-a-Feather’ talks, which were informal discussions on specific topics held during lunch, led by 1-2 session leaders. To our pleasant surprise, these informal meetings were so successful that the most common complaint was a lack of space at the tables where the discussions were held.

'''Technical Program.''' This was the first ICFHR to utilize a double-blind reviewing process, and we introduced ‘Birds-of-a-Feather’ talks, which were informal discussions on specific topics held during lunch, led by 1-2 session leaders. To our pleasant surprise, these informal meetings were so successful that the most common complaint was a lack of space at the tables where the discussions were held.

August was a busy month for the TC-11 community. In early August we had the 16th International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition (ICFHR), and last week ICPR was held in Beijing. A report on ICFHR is included in this edition of the newsletter, and a report from ICPR will be included in a future edition.

Please note that the regular paper submission deadline for ICDAR 2019 has been moved forward to February 2019. For this ICDAR there is a new joint IJDAR-ICDAR track, where one submits a paper to IJDAR, and if accepted the paper appears in IJDAR and is also presented at ICDAR 2019. The submission deadline for the IJDAR-ICDAR track is much earlier (November). Please start planning now for how you will submit your work to our flagship conference, which will be held in Sydney, Australia.

Speaking of IJDAR, the new Special Issue on Deep Learning for Document Analysis and Recognition (Vol. 21, No. 3) is now available. The table of contents and links to papers are also included in the newsletter.

Over 130 people attended the conference, which combined a strong technical program, an attractive and comfortable meeting space with great food (the Niagara Falls Event and Convention Center), and the natural beauty of Niagara Falls. The banquet was held outdoors at the Old Fort Niagara, which was first used by the French military in the late 1600s.

There was also plenty of fun to be had, particularly around the falls. Pictures from the conference are available through flickr.

Technical Program. This was the first ICFHR to utilize a double-blind reviewing process, and we introduced ‘Birds-of-a-Feather’ talks, which were informal discussions on specific topics held during lunch, led by 1-2 session leaders. To our pleasant surprise, these informal meetings were so successful that the most common complaint was a lack of space at the tables where the discussions were held.

There were 125 paper submissions from 29 countries, of which 32 were accepted for Oral presentation (26%), and 65 were accepted for Poster presentation (52%). The acceptance rate was 97/125 = 78%. The number of submissions was comparable to previous ICFHRs. All papers received at least 2 reviews, with 105 of them (84%) receiving three or more reviews.

Some very interesting keynote talks were given by Kevin Knight and Gregory R. Crane, addressing handwriting recognition from the different perspectives of a leading Computer Scientist and a leader in the Digital Humanities.

The program is available online, along with posters and slides provided by some of the authors. The proceedings will be available through IEEE Xplore in the coming weeks.

Sponsorship. The conference secured both sponsorship and participation from leading companies creating handwriting recognition-based products (MyScript, Wiris, and Hyperscience), USC/ISI, and leaders in the broader computing space (Google and Apple). An industrial panel was held by David Doermann on the last day of the conference, exploring handwriting recognition technologies in industry, and common interests between academic and industrial researchers working with handwriting. Also, thanks to support from the IAPR, we were able to provide funds for the IAPR ICFHR 2018 Awards.

Our sincerest thanks to all the participants, Organizing Committee members, support staff and student volunteers for making ICFHR 2018 a great success. Hope to see many of you at ICFHR 2020 in Dortmund!

The 2nd IAPR TC-10/TC-11 Summer School on Document Analysis (SSDA) was held in La Rochelle, from July 2nd to 6th 2018.

The aim of this summer school was to give to new students in the field of DAR (Document Analysis and Recognition) an overview of all the traditional approaches to process and analyse documents but also to focus on new trends such as deep learning, the use of interactive devices, the fraud issues in documents, and so on. Different talks were given by international researchers from France, Switzerland, Spain, Japan and the United States.

In addition to traditional oral talks, three practical sessions were carried out in order to apply some techniques addressed during the talks. The interactive sessions (such as posters and self-introduction session) were a good environment for exchanges between participants and senior researchers. Finally, a visit of the L3i laboratory was given, including demonstrations of research activities in the field of DAR.

Two awards were given. The poster award was given to Florian Westphal (Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden) for his poster titled “Efficient Binarization using Heterogeneous Computing and Interactive Learning”. The excellence award was given to Tarin Clanuwat (Center for Open Data in the Humanities, Tokyo, Japan) for her outstanding participation.

This event gathered PhD students and junior researchers from 11 countries:

France: 7

Vietnam: 4

Sweden: 2

Finland: 2

Germany: 2

Indonesia: 2

Pakistan: 1

Austria: 1

Tunisia: 1

Italy: 1

Japan: 1

Thanks to the support of the IAPR, some travel grants and fee waivers were provided for participants with limited resources. Moreover, 17 master students (16 from China and 1 from Brazil) attended this summer school in order to discover the field of Document Analysis.

ICDAR-IJDAR Journal Track (New for ICDAR 2019)

New: IJDAR Journal Track at ICDAR 2019

For the first time, ICDAR 2019 (http://www.icdar2019.org) is opening a journal track that will offer the benefit of the rapid turnaround and dissemination times of a conference while providing the paper length, scientific rigor, and careful review process of an archival journal.

The ICDAR-IJDAR journal track invites high-quality submissions that present original work in the areas of Document Analysis and Recognition appropriate to both the International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR) and the International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition (IJDAR, Impact Factor: 1.298). Accepted papers will be published in a special issue of IJDAR, and will receive an oral presentation slot at the ICDAR 2019 conference.

Journal versions of previously published conference papers or survey papers will not be considered for this special issue. Such submissions can be submitted as journal-only papers via the regular IJDAR procedures.

Authors who submit their work to the journal track commit themselves to present their results at the ICDAR conference in case of acceptance. Springer-Nature, the publisher of IJDAR, will make the papers accepted for the journal track freely available in a time frame of four weeks around the conference, beyond being available in the archival journal.

Format

Procedure and Deadlines

The deadline for journal track submissions is November 15th 2018. Earlier submissions are strongly encouraged in order to facilitate the reviewing process that will follow the IJDAR standards. A first decision about the papers should be released to the authors by January 15th, 2019.

Accepted papers will be scheduled for publication in the special issue and for presentation at ICDAR 2019. The authors of rejected papers are encouraged to submit their paper to ICDAR, following the conference guidelines.

Authors of papers accepted with minor or major revision should submit the revised version of their paper by April 15th 2019. However, if the revised paper does not fulfill the recommendations of reviewers, it will be forwarded to the regular IJDAR reviewing pipeline and will not be presented at ICDAR.

The final decision about the journal track papers should be released before May 30th 2019. Papers still under review at this date will remain in the reviewing pipeline of the journal. The deadline for camera ready versions of the accepted papers in the journal track will be June 25th and the expected publication date of the Special Issue is September 5th 2019, just before ICDAR 2019.

This special issue is a joint initiative of the board of editors of IJDAR and the Program Chairs of ICDAR 2019.

CFP: International Workshop on Robust Reading (IWRR - repost)

The 3rd IWRR workshop will be held in Perth, Australia, in conjunction with ACCV2018. The workshop aims at bringing together computer vision researchers and practitioners with an interest in reading systems that operate on images acquired in unconstrained conditions, such as scene images and video sequences, born-digital images, wearable camera and lifelog feeds, social media images, etc. The particular focus of the workshop is on the automatic extraction and interpretation of textual content in images, and applications that use textual information obtained automatically by such methods.

IWRR2018 invites the submission of original, previously unpublished work and welcomes re-submissions of improved versions of papers that have been rejected in the ACCV2018 conference reviewing process.

Workshop proceedings with accepted papers will be published along with the main conference proceedings by Springer in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series.

The topics of interest include, among others:

Word spotting and end-to-end reading systems

Scene text based image retrieval

Joint modelling of textual and visual information

Text localisation, segmentation, and recognition in scene and born-digital images

IJDAR Discount for IAPR Members (repost)

IAPR is pleased to announce a partnership agreement with Springer, the publisher of IJDAR, the International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition. This new agreement will allow IAPR members to receive a subscription to the electronic version of IJDAR at a discount of nearly 50%. For additional details, see the links below:

IRISA - Intuidoc
IRISA is a joint research center for Informatics, including Robotics and Image and Signal Processing. 800 people, 40 teams, explore the world of digital sciences to find applications in healthcare, ecology-environment, cyber-security, transportation, multimedia, and industry. INSA Rennes is one of the 8 trustees of IRISA.

The Intuidoc team (https://www.irisa.fr/intuidoc) conducts research on the topic of document image recognition. Since many years, the team proposes a system, called DMOS-PI method, for document structure analysis of documents. This DMOS-PI method is used for document recognition, or field extraction in archive documents, handwritten contents damaged documents (musical scores, archives, newspapers, letters, electronic schema, etc.).

EURHISFIRM project
EURHISFIRM European project aims at developing a research infrastructure to connect, collect, collate, align, and share reliable long-run company-level data for Europe to enable researchers, policymakers and other stakeholders to analyze, develop, and evaluate effective strategies to promote investment and economic growth. To achieve this goal, EURHISFIRM develops innovative tools to spark a “Big data” revolution in the historical social sciences and to open access to cultural heritage.

EURHISFIRM is a project funded by the European Commission within the Infrastructure Development Program of Horizon 2020. The first phase of the Infrastructure Development Program lasts for three years. It aims at developing an in-depth design study of the Research Infrastructure. After this phase, Development and Consolidation Phases follow if further applications will be successful. EURHISFIRM brings together eleven research institutions in economics, history, information technologies and data science from seven European countries.

Position to be filled

Position: Post-doctoral fellow / Research Engineer

Time commitment: Full-time

Duration of the contract: up to 36 months, starting as soon a possible

Supervisors: Bertrand Coüasnon and Aurélie Lemaitre

Indicative salary: Up to €36 000 gross annual salary (according to experience), with social security benefits

Location: IRISA – Rennes, France

Missions
The post-doctoral fellow / research engineer will be working on two tasks of EURHISFIRM workflow: the architecture of an adaptable system for document recognition, and the implementation of a generic structure layout extraction module.

The scientific challenge will be to extract information from various printed serial sources. Due to the large variety of those documents, a flexible and easy-to-adapt document recognition system is designed. For that purpose, the system will be based on a modeling of knowledge not only at the page level but also at the collection level in interaction with experts of the historical sources. Thus, redundancies between pages will be used to make the system more reliable and reduce manual corrections while obtaining a high recognition quality.

The system will we based on the DMOS-PI method which gives a framework for the analysis of collections of documents. It enables to share information from the collection between the pages, thanks to an iterative mechanism of analysis. This mechanism also makes it possible to integrate an asynchronous interaction between automatic analysis and human operators in order to limit the time of interaction by avoiding mutual waiting.

This modeling of the global analysis must be able to adapt to very different kinds of documents: from very structured documents, like stock exchange lists with redundancy and strong consistency between sequences of data, up to less structured documents, like yearbooks even if, also for them, the sequence from one year to another is important for improving the recognition quality.

The implementation of a generic structure extraction module will be based on the DMOS-PI method. It uses a grammatical language, EPF (Enhanced Position Formalism), to describe a general page layout, with perceptive vision mechanisms, and an iterative analysis. The system will also combine structural method with Deep Learning. For new collections, an adapted description of the document layout will be developed. This has to be done on a large range of structure levels: from very structured pages like table structures from stock exchange lists, up to a paragraph-oriented structures from yearbooks.

Skills in grammars and languages and/or logical programming are nice-to-have.

For further information, please contact Bertrand Coüasnon (bertrand.couasnon@irisa.fr) and Aurélie Lemaitre (aurelie.lemaitre@irisa.fr). Applicants should send a curriculum-vitae with a list of publications and the names and email addresses of up to three references.

Student Industrial Internship Opportunities (IAPR - repost)

The web page lists internship opportunities for students at different levels of education and specialism. We expect many additional internship opportunities to be listed here as the community becomes more aware of the site.

Call for Contributions: To contribute news items, please send a short
email to the editor, Richard Zanibbi ([1]).
Contributions might include conference and workshop
announcements/updates/reports, career opportunities, book reviews, or anything
else of interest to the TC-11 community.